Cable failure hits UK Internet traffic - ZDNet UK

As TAT-14 is a dual, bi-directional ring of cable, a single serious fault should not be enough to break it, as traffic would still be able to flow between the countries on the ring. Unfortunately, a part of the cable near the US coast had already suffered a technical fault earlier this month, which meant there was no built-in redundancy to cope with Tuesday's failure. According to BT, the US-side fault should be fixed by the end of this week, which will bring the cable network online again.

Tuesday's failure affected BT's voice calls, rather than its data services, but it is understood that a number of Internet service providers experienced faults.

Vanessa Evans, of LINX, the London Internet Exchange, which carries nearly all UK Internet traffic and over half of Europe's Internet traffic, said she saw a drop in traffic of around two gigabits per second. At its peak, LINX sees 32 gigabits of data every second. She added that the Internet was not broken, as traffic was rerouted through other networks.

And for historical plans of international connections (Unfortunately rather uk/us centric)see Here

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.